See Where We Come From!

April 15, 2021
Best friends Martin, Sally, Nick, Pedro, and Yulee are getting ready to celebrate their school's heritage festival. Every family has been asked to bring something to eat and something to share for show and tell. Martin, whose father is Indian and whose mother is Japanese, is bringing two dishes to the festival along with a traditional Japanese flute. Sally is Haida, and her ancestors are some of the original inhabitants of North America; she brings a cedar-bark basket. Pedro, who is Brazilian, decides to do a soccer demo. Nick has Scandinavian heritage, and he is going to wear a Viking helmet. (His moms are an interracial couple.) And Egyptian-born Yulee is excited to share an Egyptian vegetarian dish called koshary that she made with her grandmother. At the festival, the five friends share their dishes and their show-and-tell items with the rest of the school, as do their classmates. Alongside the narrative are questions prompting readers to reflect on their own backgrounds. While it is refreshing to see both Indigenous and multiracial characters in a picture book, the text focuses on what has been called the "food, festival, folklore, and fashion" approach to multiculturalism rather the complexities of migration and displacement that are the reality of so many children's lives. As a result, the text reads more as a series of cultural snapshots than a coherent narrative about diversity. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 55.6% of actual size.) Just scratches the surface of multicultural education. (Picture book. 4-8)

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March 1, 2021
Grades K-2 Martin, Sally, Pedro, Nick, and Yulee look forward to their class's Heritage Festival, where their families will bring foods representative of their Japanese, Indian, Haidan, Brazilian, Norwegian, and Egyptian cultures. Martin takes his cousin Taeko, who has just arrived from Japan, to meet Sally. All three stop to collect Pedro, Nick, and Yulee from their homes, before joining their families at the outdoor festival, where they share ethnic foods and talk about items related to their roots. The most effective pages are those set in the kids' homes, where they learn about their friends' foods and traditions. The colorful digital illustrations are bustling with activity. While plenty of books show diverse characters, few take on the topic of cultural diversity in such a straightforward way. It's particularly effective here because the five friends in Ritchie's Exploring Our Communities series are familiar faces to many children. An appended activity page encourages kids to ask about their ancestry and collect stories, recipes, and a family tree for a "Heritage Box." An appealing introduction to cultural differences.

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